SXSW 2016 Interactive Session – Virtual Reality Drives Social Good

With SXSW Interactive kicking off in less than two weeks, attendees are scrambling to map out their schedules to cover the most ground at this year’s festival, and if you are attending SXSW 2016, and looking for guidance on to which of the 500 sessions to prioritize this year. With one of this year’s hottest topics being virtual reality, a separate VR/AR Track was created, running after the Interactive Festival (March 11 – 15).

Attendees who will already be heading back home when the VR/AR portion begins on the 16th can still have an opportunity to take in virtual reality sessions at the regular Interactive festival, including the March 14th “Cause & FX: The Good and Bad of VR for Causes” session that discusses the potential power and pitfalls of the medium to engender empathy for causes, taking a look at how it has been effectively leveraged to drive social change.

Virtual Reality is one of the most buzzed-about topics going into this year’s SXSW Interactive Conference, with an exclusive VR/AR Track running from March 16-18. With the overall schedule for the Interactive conference growing year by year to reach over 500 sessions at 8 venues for 2016, I’m sure your readers are understandably overwhelmed by the wealth of knowledge at their fingertips for this year’s Austin technology and digital creativity summit.

A convergence session that is available to attendees with any type of badge (Interactive, Film, Music) that will touch on the topic of VR with a timely and universal angle. The “Cause & FX: The Good and Bad of VR for Causes” session will discuss the potential power and pitfalls of the medium to engender empathy for causes and how it has been effectively leveraged in recent campaigns. Attendees will hear about viewers being inserted into situations that evoke empathy to drive social change and how those immersive experiences can leave reverberations long after the VR headset is removed.

Specular Theory Founder/CEO Morris May discusses the impactful “Perspective” series, which has stunned Sundance attendees for that past two years with sexual assault and police violence experiences, and Emblematic Group Co-Founder James Pallot places viewers in a bombing of a refugee camp in the VR film “Project Syria.”